Managed funds can be a good way for investors, new and old, to get access to the skill and expertise of a professional to select stocks that they may not otherwise be able to access or invest in themselves. There are a number of things to be cautious of with investing in a managed fund.
In actively managed fund, the fund managers are focussed on beating a benchmark, whether its a broad based benchmark like the S&P 500, or something more niche like a small cap index benchmark. In any case, an interesting thing about managed funds is that only 30% of managed funds happen to beat the S&P 500 index benchmark (according to the S&P Managers Index).
So while the odds may be against you actually outperforming an index to begin with, many of us still have significant investments in managed funds (I certainly used to, till I sold everything about 6-7 years ago in favor of individual dividend paying stocks). What are some of the things you should be aware of investing in a managed fund?
Chasing short term performance
Fund managers chase short term performance. Fund management is a short term game. Bonuses depend on beating a quarterly benchmark, a yearly benchmark. The ridiculous thing about this is that a business takes years to grow and exhibit any sustained value. A 3 month or 6 month time horizon is really just about timing the market, not really growing any meaningful value.
Huge churn in positions
Because active fund managers are so focussed on needing to beat short term benchmarks, they buy and sell companies every few days like they are going out of style. This is not only a significant cost in trading costs, but it also creates many capital gain and capital loss events which you need to record for tax purposes. So while you fund may have delivered you nothing in performance for a given year, you have a tax administration headache to deal with all these positions that you fund has divested, not to mention a smaller return because you of all the trading costs you have to bear.
Even worse still, trading so often doesn’t allow the time for any investments to compound. Time is an investors best friend (well, time and dividends!). Its how you grow significant total return in the long run. Buying and selling every few months is more of a tactical trading advantage rather than setting you up for long term investment success.
Management Expense ratios
My biggest gripe with actively managed funds is the expense ratios that they charge. These expenses are taken out before returns are paid to you as an investor. So that 1.5% gross return that you happen to eke out? That may have just disappeared once the manager takes their fee. Sometimes its easy to overlook the impact of just how big an impact these expenses can have on your long term performance.
To put this in some perspective, on a $100k portfolio, you could be looking at $2000 annually in terms of fees. Over the course of 40 years those annual fees an expenses could easily be the cost of your initial $100k investment!
Compared to this, many index funds have expense ratio that are a fraction of what you would pay in an actively managed funds, which is why i prefer index funds over their actively managed counterparts.
Window dressing
At the end of each quarter, many fund managers scramble around to dump their losers and buy the winners that their respective funds benchmark. So if Apple was the hot stock for the quarter, and a fund manager didn’t hold that stock, they will be running around at the end of the quarter to make sure the stock appears as one of their holdings.
While this is not only potentially misleading as it gives investors the impression that this has been an active holding for the entire performance period, its actually much worse from a more fundamental point of view. By looking to purchase a “hot stock” at the end of a quarter and dump a “loser”, your managed fund is doing exactly what you don’t want them to as an investor which is to buy high and sell low.
If there are good reasons for a stocks poor performance that’s one thing, however fund managers often dump poor performing stocks purely on the basis that they are the worst performers. If the business is a high quality one, its highly likely to rebound at some point in time, even if its underperformed in a give period. Unfortunately window dressing doesn’t allow you the opportunity to see that improved growth because the stock has been dumped.
Performance Records
The presentation of performance records can certainly be a dubious practice. While you may have periods of outperformance from a fund manager for 1-2 years, its very difficult for a fund manager to consistently perform for an extended period of time, greater than 5 or 10 years. Performance tends to revert back to a mean benchmark over a period of time, either as fund size grows or the manager trades closer to the index (given they have to hold progressively larger companies). Ensuring that you look at a complete view or performance of a fund manager can save you from making a negative investment decision based on 1-2 years of selectively presented data.
Managed funds can be a valuable addition to your portfolio if you are looking for exposure to asset classes that are otherwise difficult to access. But you need to be aware of some of the pitfalls, tactics and selective marketing that are used to highlight fund success
What are your thoughts on using managed funds to achieve your investment goals?
I have a huge gripe when it comes to expense ratios as well. Also it has been proven that the majority of managed funds fail to out perform the S&P 500.
In most cases, I feel you don’t get the value for money investing in a managed fund given the expenses that you have to pay, particularly given most underperform
I don’t even consider actively managed funds for my portfolio. The fact that so few of them can beat the S&P over an extended period of time just doesn’t make them worth the large fees that most of them carry. I stick to index funds and etf’s in my retirement accounts and have started buying dividend growth stocks in my taxable account.
Agreed- At least with dividend growth stocks its just the initial commission fee and you are done, the annual fees are a huge drag on ongoing performance.
I avoid managed funds like the plague. Even if I was looking at trying to get exposure to more difficult to acquire asset classes, I would probably go for an index fund over an actively managed fund. Their performance is just abysmal.
The other thing to worry about with managed funds is if the manager changes. The first guy might actually be able to beat the S&P500. But then the new guy solidly under-performs.
Manager competence has huge impacts on actively managed funds. The other significant issue for star funds, even with a successful manager is the volume of new funds that they eventually need to end up managing based on their initial success. It becomes much harder to achieve those same high rates of return as your fund gets progressively larger and you have more to invest, which takes you closer to the index in terms of performance.